


It's 3:54 AM, your mouth tastes like chocolate and regret, and there's something he's not telling you.

by ectobiologust



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, M/M, Unrequited, Unresolved Romantic Tension, dave probably doesnt even notice, john is a huge loser who cant get over a break up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-30
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-01-17 13:33:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1389583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ectobiologust/pseuds/ectobiologust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And you want to forget the way he’d tease you with that stupid smirk over a grainy webcam image at three o’clock in the morning, and you want to forget the way you felt as you drug yourself through the school day; half asleep but satisfied that you were in your sluggish state because you’d wasted half a night talking about something you didn't even remember with your dumbass boyfriend who lived a thousand miles away."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Preface

He’s always been there. Not physically of course, no, physically he’s off somewhere down in Texas, probably sleeping off another remarkable day in the standard public schooling system or eating shitty Chinese takeout or mixing something on those dumb turntables of his. He’s always on your mind, though. Your thoughts wander to him in Algebra while your teacher walks you all through basic factoring and you doze off in the back of the classroom during group reading in English after another night of accommodating the time difference by losing out on a few hours of sleep. You’d roll your eyes, tell him it’s no biggie, you could always nap it off once you got home, this always afforded you another hour or so of mindless chatter before you finally began nodding off as you typed, two vibrant colors of text blurring together as the desktop’s light burned your retinas and you finally gave in after logging off for the night. 

Some days you have to remind yourself that you don’t have any more of a right to claim his time than anyone else. Well, not anymore, anyways. You used to. It was just the sort of entitlement you came to assume was achieved after establishing a relationship with someone. Sometimes he was busy, and that was okay, you could wait for a while. It was so worth having his undivided attention once he was finished. Things are different though, now. Someone else occupies his time and affections and most likely his thoughts and the idea of it is enough to make your mouth turn sour as you shift uncomfortably in your computer chair. 

You ditch that thought in favor of another. This is stupid. And it is, too. It’s redundant, and pointless, and you’re pining over someone who’s already moved on and found someone else who supposedly suits them better than you ever could have. And you want that to be okay, you really do. You want to be happy because he’s happy, and you want to be content with the fact that he has someone who cares for him and makes him smile. But you can’t. Because no matter how hard you try to forget, you desperately want to be that person. 

And you want to forget the way he’d tease you with that stupid smirk over a grainy webcam image at three o’clock in the morning, and you want to forget the way you felt as you drug yourself through the school day, half asleep but satisfied that you were in your sluggish state because you’d wasted half a night talking about something you didn’t even remember with your dumbass boyfriend who lived a thousand miles away. You want to forget how great that last bit sounded when you finally managed to work a genuine smile out of him and he’d shake his head and you could physically feel his eyes roll while he shot you a sarcastically stated comment about his awful taste in dates. 

So you don’t forget those, you just sort of repress them. Shove them to the back of your mind, where they can peacefully reside with that bad grade you got in Civics last week, and the daunting task of holding your own against dad’s unending rain of pranking fury that looms ahead on April 1st, just like every year. You distract yourself with other things, like chatting with Jade about her weird, nonexistent napping schedules, or allowing Rose to actually explain her weird dark prophecies. Your usual conversations provide a great diversion for the days you can’t seem to muster up your patented sheen of optimistic sarcasm with just a hint of japery. You just listen and reply every now and then, that’s easy enough. Even when Rose loses you at the words “unspeakable terrors”, you provide an eloquent ‘uh huh’ and neither of them are the wiser. 

It’s harder when Dave messages you, though. He has a talent for dragging out idle chatter for hours with his run away metaphors and awful jokes and god, yeah, you love that about him, but when that idle chatter is about this mysterious flame of his, it just burns. Metaphorically, duh. The worst of it is when you have to reply with an “aww, our little davey’s growing up!” or the occasional “they sound great, dave.” And even still, he expects the same lively conversationalist you’re pretty sure you usually are. You can still be that person some days, when he drops the topic of his new relationship and you’re able to forget for just a little while. It all comes back when he logs off early to ‘meet a friend’, and the differences of time zones can only leave you up for hours, disappointed and distraught; or when he happens to forget the promise he’d made just that morning to FaceTime with you. That sudden heavy gloom is unshakable, and you know it’ll take you at least a day to sleep it off before you can feel like yourself again and the cycle repeats itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay tuned, longer first chapter to come when I feel like churning it out.
> 
> Meanwhile, leave some quick feedback! Or some harsh criticism. Maybe even your great grandma's favorite recipe for pineapple upside-down cake. Really, leave anything. I'll be happy to see a comment.


	2. One Year Prior

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering ectoBiologist [EB] at 16:13 --  
TG: hey bro  
EB: hey dave!  
TG: whats a little boy like you doing up at this time of day  
EB: no school tomorrow, we've got snow.  
TG: you fucking always have snow  
EB: haha, i know. it's great.  
EB: you should totally try it sometime.  
TG: northerners are too mainstream  
TG: get the slightest bit of ice in texas and schools out for a week  
TG: its pretty great  
EB: wow.  
EB: pshhhhhhhh. weak.  
TG: bring it egg boy you can kiss my strider ass  
EB: my lips are going nowhere near the strider booty, i swear on my nanna's grave.  
TG: dont you keep her in an urn  
EB: yeah, but it occasionally falls off the mantel and we have to sweep her up.  
EB: i inhaled some once, it was gross.  
TG: that means you didnt swear on shit man you aint gonna do nothin  
EB: fine then, i swear on your alleged heterosexuality.  
EB: oops, looks like that's nonexistent, too.  
EB: well shit!  
EB: the point is, my mouth and your butt are not going to be introduced any time soon.  
TG: not soon  
TG: but not never  
EB: shut up dave.

\-- ectoBiologist [EB] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 16:24 --  
Your conversations went that way frequently nearing your fourteenth birthday. You’d hint towards your slight infatuation, he’d probably hint back, and then the two of you would sink back into your usual conversational habits. He’d tease you; you’d call him an ass. Sometimes, though, it got frustrating. It got frustrating because you could never tell just how serious he was.

You’ve found yourself reading over logs from previous conversations, the majority of them residing in a file labeled “the good old days”. Really, it was just a cluster of conversations the two of you had had before the establishment of your relationship, and the intense air of cautious discomfort that was prevalent in the majority of your exchanges afterwards. Honestly, the logs were way outdated. It’d been about a year since the two of you recognized your relationship as an actual thing that was totally happening with some awful diabetes-inducing Facebook status that might as well have been literally dripping with cheese. Yeah, you were that deep. And honestly, you probably still are.

Not that you want to be. The two of you had dated on and off for the last year, and yeah, there were plenty of rough times. As much as you loved him, sometimes you just had to take a step back, get in some time with a few friends from school. You’d go for a month a time after breakup, on average, with no contact. The worst stretches were the spaces in between, when he’d spur a sudden relationship no less than a week after your previous split. The sudden sharp realization that wow, you really didn’t seem to be all that hard to replace was actually something you weren’t expecting the first time around.

‘The first time around’. Man, that makes it seem so tame. Like a scene from some teen drama on Lifetime, something that could be compacted and labeled into a short expanse of time. Really, though, it was a period that you could have sworn drug on for a year. The initial break up itself was tough, of course, but the silence that followed was unbearable and the searing pain of rejection dulled in that time to a sort of lingering dull ache. 

It was that dull ache that kept you off Pesterchum for a while. You didn’t like seeing that greyed out handle. He had blocked you shortly after breaking the news that he just couldn’t do the whole online relationship thing. He felt trapped, he said. It was almost humorous, the way you replied with the best ‘oh man, i totally understand!’ you could manage. And he still blocked you. The worst of it was your inability to remove him from your chumRoll. No, you couldn’t do that until he had unblocked you, in the very least. You really needed to submit a complaint about that. So there the handle stayed, mocking you with its darkened text as oppose to the bright white of Jade’s handle and the small icon notifying you of her mood status. Your mouse hovered precariously over the text often, and you considered for a brief time nearly every day contacting her to ask how he was doing. 

And that made you even sicker, because you weren’t considering it to actually speak with Jade. No. You just wanted her to relay some info. Anything he’d mentioned would do. Was he having a rough time? Did he still think of you? Did he regret it? You spoke to Jade and Rose less and less, because the more you guys talked, the more you asked about him. And that only opened the conversation for questions from the two of them about how you were holding up. You hated those. You hated having to answer in way that made you sound as chipper as a fucking chipmunk because you knew you definitely didn’t feel chipper. 

You felt like the incessant sting of rejection. You felt like the dank lack of warmth of loneliness. You felt like the sharp taste of metallic blood in your mouth the day you fell off of the monkey bars at school and busted your nose up. You had done your best, held on with the tightest grip you could manage. And you had fun, too, while it lasted. But in all of your childish naivety, you missed a bar and hit the ground hard with a sudden realization that wow, that really hurt. And there was no one to blame but yourself, so as you ran to the teacher and cried and desperately tried to make sense of the fact that suddenly there was blood leaking from your nose, you didn’t have anyone to pass it off onto. Just you and your own dumb mistake. And still, you were told you could have landed on your neck and rolled forwards. You were told it could have been worse. You were told you should be glad it was only an online relationship, never anything serious. Just a couple of kids messing around over the internet. 

And when he changed his Facebook profile status to ‘In a relationship’, you felt like the harsh reality that was replacement. And you felt like the litter swept away into a city flood drain after a cleansing rain, all useless pullout ads from magazines and flyers from used car dealerships and empty foam cups from fast food places that had probably been kicked out of car on accident, and you felt like the floor of a public transport bus, all tracked with dirt and chewed gum and stepped on without apologies because that was it’s only purpose. 

And your smile became the stupid garnishing piece of parsley they put on meals at places that aren’t all that fancy, but want to seem like they are. The one that no one really eats, because it’s just plain parsley and that’s sort of gross, but it’s there to make the whole thing look nicer; more appetizing. Even though when you’re done, often the only thing that’s left is bits of your dinner and that one piece of parsley. Because it’s not actually part of the meal, just something ripped off a plant and thrown on there to make it look nice. It’s artificial and pointless and so was your smile. 

You’re better now, one year and three relationships later. Better. Sometimes you have to wonder if that’s truly the case.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh man, this took me way too long! Next time you guys should come yell at me over at www.thefreshprinceofconheir.tumblr.com literally just send me a ton of asks demanding I start writing for the next chapter because someone has to keep me on task.


	3. Not actually a chapter I am very sorry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Incoherent screaming.

Hey guys! This fic is actually going on hiatus for awhile, seeing as I've hit some major writer's block and school is sucking up the majority of my time lately. If you've got any tips for that, drop 'em in the comments. Hope to see you all again soon!

**Author's Note:**

> Stay tuned, longer first chapter to come when I feel like churning it out.
> 
> Meanwhile, leave some quick feedback! Or some harsh criticism. Maybe even your great grandma's favorite recipe for pineapple upside-down cake. Really, leave anything. I'll be happy to see a comment.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Moving On is Hard. It's hard and no one understands.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2323427) by [classpect](https://archiveofourown.org/users/classpect/pseuds/classpect)




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